The reason that Donald Trump is president-elect is because the last several years saw the biggest scandal in presidential history. Joe Biden was dead, and everyone knew it, and the media lied about it and the White House covered it up.
00:00:00.000Folks, the reason that Donald Trump is president-elect is because the last several years saw the biggest scandal in presidential history.
00:00:06.000I'm going to explain that in a moment.
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00:00:17.000All righty, so the reason that Donald Trump is president-elect again is not just because Donald Trump is a unique figure, out of the box, historically, figuratively.
00:01:16.000The Wall Street Journal had a long piece yesterday titled, How the White House Functioned with a Diminished Biden in Charge.
00:01:21.000Now, by the way, what this means normally is the 25th Amendment should have been applied to Joe Biden.
00:01:27.000His cabinet should have said he is no longer capable of holding this office and they should have made Kamala Harris president, but they didn't have the stones to do it.
00:01:33.000And so instead, they've allowed this diminished president, this person whose brain is not functional, continuing in the office of the presidency of the United States, the most important office on planet Earth, simply because they didn't have the actual guts to oust him.
00:01:53.000I think the amount of damage that did to the Democratic ticket this year is almost incalculable.
00:01:58.000Because no matter how many times Democrats called Republicans liars or a threat to the Republic, no matter how much they said that Donald Trump was not normal, it turns out, you know, what's the most not normal thing?
00:02:07.000Keeping a corpse in the White House like Weekend at Bernie's, wheeling him around, press conference to press conference, wheeling him out and wheeling him in and pretending he's sentient while the rest of the public can see everything that's happening.
00:02:20.000It was one of the great emperor's new clothes moments in American history.
00:02:23.000According to the Wall Street Journal, To adapt the White House around the needs of a diminished leader, the White House told visitors to keep meetings focused.
00:02:31.000Interactions with senior Democratic leaders and some cabinet members, including powerful secretaries like Defense Lloyd Austin and Treasury's Janet Yellen, were infrequent or grew less frequent.
00:02:40.000Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president's ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.'s disastrous plot from Afghanistan.
00:02:47.000The disastrous pullout from Afghanistan was September 2021. That was the very beginning of his presidency.
00:02:53.000So pretty much from the moment he entered office, he was so diminished that cabinet members were not meeting with him and neither were members of the legislature.
00:03:00.000And it's not as though anything was important happening, you know, like the pullout from Afghanistan, like October 7th, or like inflation at a 40-year high.
00:03:08.000And the Democratic Party couldn't be bothered.
00:03:10.000Because they were so high on their own supply.
00:03:12.000They believed that the American public hated Donald Trump so much that they could literally pretend that this mummy was president of the United States and functional even though we could all see that he was not.
00:03:23.000I'm not sure if there's a bigger political scandal or a bigger media scandal.
00:03:27.000Again, I sort of repeat myself here because, as I've said many times, there is a Democrat media human centipede in which the Democratic Party decides what are the issues that matter most, and the media just repeat the mad nauseam.
00:03:37.000The legacy media are just stenographers for the Democratic Party.
00:03:41.000For both of them, it's a massive scandal.
00:03:44.000According to the Wall Street Journal, senior advisors were often put into roles that some administration officials and lawmakers thought Biden should occupy, with people like National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Senior Counselor Steve Reschetti, and National Economic Council Head Lael Brainard and her predecessor frequently in the position of being go-betweens for the president.
00:04:24.000According to the Wall Street Journal, presidents always have gatekeepers, but in Biden's case, the walls around him were higher and the controls greater, according to Democratic lawmakers, donors, and aides who worked for Biden and other administrations.
00:04:34.000There were limits over who Biden spoke with, limits on what they said to him, limits around the sources of information he consumed.
00:04:47.000They gave him an anodyne world in which everything was hunky-dory and no one could see that he was diminished.
00:04:53.000The White House operated this way even as the president and his aides pressed forward with his re-election bid.
00:04:58.000This accounts of how the White House functioned with an aging leader at the top of its organizational chart is based on interviews with nearly 50 people, including those who participated in or had direct knowledge of the operations.
00:05:06.000And by the way, I'm here for all the tell-all books that are going to be coming out over the course of the next three years demonstrating the extent of this extraordinary scandal.
00:05:14.000And it really is an extraordinary, extraordinary scandal.
00:05:18.000According to the Wall Street Journal, The system put Biden at an unusual remove from cabinet secretaries, the chairs of congressional committees, and other high-ranking officials.
00:05:26.000It also insulated him from the scrutiny of the American public.
00:05:29.000The strategies to protect Biden largely worked until June 27th, when Biden stood on an Atlanta debate stage with Trump, searching for words unable to complete his thoughts on live television.
00:05:38.000Much of the Democratic establishment had accepted the White House line that Biden was able to take the fight to Trump, even in the face of direct evidence to the contrary.
00:05:45.000Well, that does raise the question, why would they think that?
00:06:00.000As I said, after that debate, the reason the media turned on Joe Biden was not because a light bulb had gone off and suddenly they realized that Joe Biden was not mentally capable.
00:06:12.000What happened is they were embarrassed.
00:06:13.000They're embarrassed because now it was clear to everyone just how incapable the president of the United States actually was.
00:06:20.000It's always been about their profile with the American public and they thought they could get away with it.
00:06:27.000And then Joe Biden pants them, and that embarrassed them, and they didn't like it, and they turned on Joe Biden.
00:06:32.000According to the Wall Street Journal, Biden, staff with advisors since he became a senator at age 30, came to the White House with a small team of fiercely loyal, long-serving aides who knew him and Washington so well they could be particularly effective proxies.
00:06:43.000They did not tolerate criticism of Biden's performance or broader dissent within the Democratic Party, especially when it came to the president's decision to run for a second term.
00:06:51.000Yet a sign that the bruising presidential schedule needed to be adjusted for Biden's advanced age had arisen early on, in just the first few months of his term.
00:06:58.000Administration officials noticed the president became tired if meetings went long and would make mistakes.
00:07:04.000Okay, again, he was not up to the rigors of the job from basically day one.
00:07:09.000Ideally, meetings would start later in the day.
00:07:11.000Since Biden has never been at his best first thing in the morning, some of the people said, what, he wasn't a morning person?
00:07:21.000And y'all lied about it for years until he exposed himself on national television like a predator outside a child's playground mentally.
00:07:29.000His staff made these adjustments to limit potential missteps by Biden, the people said.
00:07:33.000The president, known for long rambling sessions, at times pushed in the opposite direction, wanting or just taking more time.
00:07:39.000If the president was having an off day, meetings would be scrapped altogether.
00:07:42.000And this is what happens when people get older and their brain doesn't work as well as it used to.
00:07:46.000They have good days and they have bad days.
00:07:48.000On one such occasion in the spring of 2021. Spring 2021. Listen to how early this is.
00:07:53.000Again, the media wanted you to believe that he only fell apart in 2024. Spring 2021. He was elected in winter 2020. He took office in January 2021. Spring 2021 would have been like April.
00:08:10.000He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day, so we're going to address this tomorrow, the former aide recalled the official saying.
00:08:16.000Adam Smith of Washington found when he tried to share his concerns with the president ahead of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 that Biden was very hard to reach.
00:08:25.000He was the chair of the House Armed Services Committee, and he was alarmed by what he viewed as overly optimistic comments from Biden as the administration assembled plans for the operation.
00:08:32.000I was begging them to set expectations low, said Smith.
00:08:35.000He sought to talk with Biden directly to share his insights about the region, but couldn't get on the phone with him.
00:08:40.000After the disastrous withdrawal, Smith made a critical comment to the Washington Post about the administration lacking a clear-eyed view of the U.S.-backed Ashraf Ghani government's durability.
00:08:49.000It was among comments that triggered an angry phone call from Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who ended up getting an earful from the frustrated chairman.
00:08:56.000Shortly after Smith got an apologetic call from Biden, it was the only call Biden ever made to Smith in four years.
00:09:03.000Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said his interactions with the White House in the past two years were primarily focused on the reauthorization of FISA. Biden's senior advisors and other top administration officials worked with Himes on the issue.
00:09:15.000He praised the collaboration, but Biden was not part of the conversation.
00:09:21.000One lawmaker who did get one-on-one time with Biden noticed the president lacked stamina and relied heavily on staff.
00:09:27.000Senator Joe Manchin, He said that the job required a level of energy he wasn't sure Biden had been able to sustain.
00:09:33.000Quote, I just thought maybe the president just lost that fight.
00:09:48.000Janet Yellen went out there and said he was totally fine.
00:09:51.000Kamala Harris went out there and said he was totally fine before stabbing him directly between the shoulder blades and throwing his body off the back of the boat.
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00:12:11.000But Treasury Secretary Yellen, who was out there saying that he was totally fine, also according to the Wall Street Journal, quote, had an arm's length relationship with the president for much of the administration.
00:12:20.000She was part of the economics team that regularly briefed the president, but one-on-one discussions were rare.
00:12:24.000She typically dealt with the National Economic Council or with the president's advisors, rather than Biden directly, according to people familiar with the interactions.
00:12:31.000Some current and former administration officials said they would have expected a closer relationship between the two.
00:12:38.000Over four years, Biden held nine full cabinet meetings.
00:12:55.000Again, it is just amazing that they thought they could get away with this.
00:12:58.000Biden's team also insulated him on the campaign trail, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:13:01.000In the summer of 2023, one prominent Democratic donor put together a small event for Biden's re-elect bid.
00:13:06.000The donor was shocked when a campaign official told him the attendees should not expect to have a free-ranging Q&A session with the president.
00:13:13.000Instead, the organizer was told to send in two or three questions ahead of time that Joe Biden would answer.
00:13:18.000At some events, the Biden campaign printed pre-approved questions on note cards and gave donors the cards to read the questions.
00:13:24.000Even with all the steps, Biden made flubs.
00:13:26.000Some donors said they noticed how staff stepped in to mask other signs of decline.
00:13:30.000Throughout his presidency, Biden was assisted by a small group of aides who were laser focused on him in a far different way than when he was VP or how former presidents Bill Clinton or Obama were staffed during their presidencies.
00:13:40.000These aides were often with the president as he traveled.
00:13:43.000They stayed within earshot or eye distance.
00:13:45.000They would often repeat basic instructions to him, such as where to enter or exit a station.
00:14:22.000We were told that was a cheap fake by the legacy media.
00:14:26.000The president's team of pollsters had limited access to Biden.
00:14:30.000By the 2024 campaign, pollsters were not talking to the president about their findings.
00:14:34.000Instead, they sent memos that went to top campaign staff.
00:14:38.000This summer, Democratic insiders became alarmed by the way Biden described his own polling, publicly characterizing the race as a toss-up when polls released in the weeks after the disastrous June debate consistently showed Trump ahead.
00:14:48.000They worried he wasn't getting an unvarnished look at his standing in the race.
00:14:51.000And then apparently, on July 11th, when Biden's top advisors met behind closed doors with Democratic senators and the advisors laid out a roadmap for Biden's victory, the message was so disconnected from public polling that it left Democratic senators incredulous.
00:15:04.000It spurred Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to speak to Biden directly.
00:15:08.000Now the thing about all of this is that we knew all of this.
00:15:10.000This is the part that makes it scandalous.
00:15:32.000So for years, we were told transgender medicine was a life-saving protocol.
00:15:37.000And then it turns out, as Britain is banning transgender medicine, one of the great misnomers in human history, for minors, now all of a sudden you're getting editorials from the Washington Post saying, hey, you know...
00:15:48.000There might be some problems with this.
00:16:09.000America was running on autopilot with Joe Biden's aides figuring out foreign policy and domestic policy and Joe Biden in the other room sleeping And we're supposed to believe that you get to do the, oh, well, at least now we're burying our souls.
00:16:25.000The media are always late and they are always wrong, which is not a mistake.
00:16:29.000It means that they are wrong in the moment.
00:16:32.000They are wrong in the moment, in the time that it matters.
00:16:34.000Because it doesn't matter now whether Joe Biden was senile or not.
00:17:02.000It mattered during this entire Ukraine war when Joe Biden was simultaneously suggesting that we were going to endlessly fund the Ukraine war and also that there was no off-ramp that he could name.
00:17:55.000They got a terrible administration from a diminished elderly man.
00:17:59.000And just to add a cherry on top of that sundae, they did it on behalf of Kamala Harris, an absolute trash heap of a candidate who with a billion and a half dollars and a glide path to the presidency couldn't land the plane.
00:18:34.000This is, you know, if Walter Durante shows up in 1952 and says, hey, by the way, I'm sorry I screwed up that whole coverage of the Ukrainian famine thing.
00:19:20.000Okay, well, the good news is that this giant presidential lie, this enormous, enormous lie.
00:19:26.000Again, I'm not a conspiracy theorist guy, but the conspiracy was right out in the open.
00:19:31.000It was a conspiracy between members of the White House and members of the Democratic Congress and members of the media to cover up Joe Biden's mental condition.
00:19:38.000That does not require any speculation.
00:19:43.000The consequences of the unraveling of that conspiracy, which you can all see right in front of our eyes, again, the single worst decision, I think, in modern American political history was Joe Biden daring Donald Trump to debate him.
00:20:08.000Anyway, the consequence of that was, of course, Donald Trump becoming president.
00:20:11.000And I got to say, going into the new year, I am super optimistic about the Trump presidency.
00:20:16.000Last night, I had the opportunity to speak at the Turning Point Summit America Fest over in Phoenix, Arizona.
00:20:22.000And man, I have to say, Charlie Kirk, that dude knows how to put on a show.
00:20:26.000So Charlie, I've known Charlie since Charlie was 18 years old.
00:20:29.000Really, I mean, he's only 31 now, which is pretty incredible.
00:20:32.000Charlie was 18 years old when I met him.
00:20:34.000Just a brash young kid, really smart, real go-getter.
00:20:37.000He was hanging around the David Horowitz Freedom Center conference at the Breakers near here in Palm Beach.
00:20:43.000And I met Charlie and I immediately started hooking him up with donors because I said, this dude is going to be the head of the RNC one day.
00:20:53.000Well, Charlie has built an amazing organization in Turning Point.
00:20:56.000And this AmericaFest event that he puts on, which now has 20,000 people that are going to show up over the course of the next four days, amazing event.
00:21:03.000I'm telling everybody from students to just general members of the public, I had the opportunity to speak there last night and talk about what I was optimistic about for the future of the country.
00:21:13.000I also got to announce a project that we at Daily Wire Plus are doing with Turning Point.
00:21:17.000We'll announce that in just a few moments here on the show.
00:21:21.000But it was a great event, really terrific event.
00:21:23.000And what I talked about is the fact that I'm optimistic because President Trump is going to make the economy robust again.
00:21:30.000He's going to make the economy dynamic again because Trump is a win-first guy.
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00:24:41.000Because at the very least, it's do no harm.
00:24:44.000At the very least, you know this administration is not going to come in and start upending every ridiculous table they can find.
00:24:52.000They're not going to come in and start talking about how business needs to be punished for its success.
00:24:58.000They're not going to talk about how unionization, for example, is the cure for what ails America's economic situation.
00:25:07.000They're not going to talk about how regulation is going to fix everything.
00:25:10.000And that's not what this administration is about.
00:25:12.000So you can look forward to a more robust economy under President Trump.
00:25:15.000On foreign policy, you can look forward to solidification of foreign policy.
00:25:19.000Joe Biden is the worst foreign policy president of my lifetime, which is an amazing thing to say, considering there's a man named Barack Obama who exists.
00:25:26.000Joe Biden has been a horror show on foreign policy.
00:25:29.000And as I've talked about, there is a Trump doctrine and the Trump doctrine is basically FAFO. The Trump doctrine is American citizens come first.
00:25:37.000America comes first, which should be obvious.
00:25:39.000But American citizens do have interests in what happens abroad.
00:25:43.000So, for example, the freedom of the seas.
00:25:45.000The freedom of the Taiwan Strait or the Malacca Strait, so that, you know, the free flow of goods can actually allow us to receive goods, products, and services in an affordable way.
00:25:54.000The United States has an interest in the free flow of energy and oil, which is why we're interested in, say, Saudi Arabia, and also in drilling domestically.
00:26:02.000We have an interest in curbing the regional ambitions of Iran, which is responsible for killing a vast bevy of American soldiers abroad, as well as targeting America's allies everywhere from the Middle East to Europe to South America.
00:26:14.000We have an interest in containing China, the American public.
00:26:18.000Perhaps China most of all, because China is not only stealing our intellectual property, China is not only threatening Taiwan, which is the source of all the semiconductors that are useful in sophisticated technology, China is not only threatening all of those various shipping channels that I mentioned earlier, China is also shipping the precursors for fentanyl into Mexico, and Mexico is then shipping those over the border via the drug cartels.
00:26:42.000There are all sorts of foreign interests that Americans have.
00:26:45.000Which brings us to the second point about Donald Trump's foreign policy, which is we should calibrate our action to the level of interest the American public has in the thing.
00:26:53.000So if a bad thing is happening in some far-off land that's really bad, and if we can do something minor to help that, great.
00:26:58.000But if it requires a serious commitment, it better be a serious matter to the American public.
00:28:10.000Democrats think J.D. Vance is weird because he has a wife and kids, grew up in bad circumstances, and made something of himself after serving in the military, and then is vice president-elect at the ripe old age of 39. They think that guy's weird.
00:29:28.000They're particularly not large majorities because there are a bunch of people who are moderate Republicans in purple districts in the House and in the Senate.
00:29:34.000You have a few senators who are from purplish states.
00:29:39.000And so what that means is that everything that Donald Trump wants that has to be gotten done legislatively is going to require compromise.
00:29:45.000And that's going to require somebody to broker the compromise at the top level.
00:29:48.000In this case, John Thune in the Senate and Mike Johnson in the House.
00:29:52.000And so all of these sort of misplaced ire over the past 72 hours at Mike Johnson, as though Mike Johnson was just sort of freelancing and freewheeling when he came up with the Cromnibus package.
00:30:04.000Now, we can argue over whether Speaker of the House Johnson made too many concessions in order to get the things that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance wanted in the original bill.
00:30:12.000I would say, sure, there are some things in there that definitely should not have been in there.
00:30:15.000And frankly, I'm glad that that version of the bill went down.
00:30:18.000And as I said yesterday, I think the amount of disaster relief in the bill is excessive.
00:30:22.000I think the farm subsidies are excessive.
00:30:26.000However, blaming Johnson for that is ignoring the fact that there must be coordination, heavy coordination, between Donald Trump, who establishes what he would like to get done, Mike Johnson, who establishes what can get done in the House, and outside influencers who are pointing out the discrepancy between the two.
00:31:14.000Lost productivity was like $3 billion, supposedly.
00:31:17.000All the vital checks still went out, like Social Security.
00:31:20.000So if there were to be a government shutdown, the media would play it as though the world was ending, the world would not be ending.
00:31:25.000However, politically, it would not benefit President Trump to go into his new presidency, not only with a government shutdown, But also with having to presumably then deal with the fallout in the House.
00:31:37.000That's not what you need if you're President Trump.
00:31:39.000You need a machine that's ready to go day one.
00:31:44.000It should be the only focus from the Trump administration.
00:31:46.000I think now that reality is setting in, that will be the only focus from the Trump administration.
00:31:50.000Get past this thing, get to the administration, and then coordinate everything between the leadership and the Congress.
00:31:59.000Do that, and you can have an effective administration.
00:32:02.000I'll give you an example of when the circular firing squad starts.
00:32:05.000So, as we discussed yesterday, originally, the Cromnibus package, the continuing resolution, could have been done with just a three-page bill.
00:32:12.000That says, we're going to continue to fund the government at current levels up through January 20th, or January 10th.
00:32:20.000Instead, Trump, Vance, Johnson, they all wanted disaster relief provisions in the bill because of the fallout from Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, among others.
00:32:29.000And they also wanted farm subsidies in the bill because they believe that farmers have been shortchanged by the Democrats.
00:32:36.000In order to get those things, you are going to need to make concessions to Democrats because there are some Republicans who would drop off the bill based on the spending levels.
00:32:45.000In order to get those concessions, you'd have to give some concessions.
00:32:48.000And some of those concessions, I think, were frankly wrong.
00:32:52.000Other concessions, I think, were overblown.
00:32:54.000So, for example, the idea that there was a pay raise for Congress that was 74, that's not true.
00:32:58.000There's a cost of living adjustment for Congress.
00:33:01.000Is that like a major issue in American politics?
00:33:10.000As far as the Global Engagement Center, a place that we literally sued, and that is a State Department offshoot, That engages in soft censorship.
00:33:19.000My understanding is the reason that Republicans in the House, including Speaker Johnson, were willing to sort of make that concession is the assumption was as soon as Trump entered office, Secretary of State Rubio would come in and just kill the Global Engagement Center anyway.
00:33:33.000With all of that said, the reality is it was it was not a good bill.
00:33:36.000Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy pointed out all the flaws in the bill.
00:33:41.000And President Trump and J.D. Vance, who had coordinated with Johnson on the bill, they decided that they didn't want the bill after all.
00:33:48.000And so they decided to pull the bill and then suggest an alternative.
00:33:51.000So yesterday played out as total chaos in the It played out as total chaos because, again, I think that reality is being sort of gradually accepted.
00:34:03.000And the reality, as I mentioned yesterday, is that politics is a coalitional game.
00:34:06.000The Republican caucus is very fractious, and they have an incredibly narrow majority.
00:34:09.000And that means you're not going to get everything you want.
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00:36:51.000Alrighty, so after the death of the Cromnibus package at the hands of President Trump and Elon Musk, the new proposal that President Trump put forward was a continuing resolution That would include funding for, for example, farmers as well as disaster relief and also would increase the debt ceiling for two full years.
00:37:10.000President Trump put out a statement in support of this proposal.
00:37:13.000Again, Speaker Johnson has been coordinating with Trump every step of the way.
00:37:18.000President Trump put out a statement saying, success in Washington.
00:37:21.000Speaker Mike Johnson and the House have come to a very good deal for the American people.
00:37:24.000The newly agreed to American Relief Act of 2024 will keep the government open, fund our great farmers and others, and provide relief for those severely impacted by the devastating hurricanes.
00:37:32.000A very important piece vital to the America First agenda was added as well.
00:37:35.000The date of the very unnecessary debt ceiling will be pushed out two years to January 30th, 2027. Now we can make America great again very quickly, which is what the people gave us a mandate to accomplish.
00:37:44.000All Republicans, even Democrats, should do what is best for our country and vote yes for this bill tonight.
00:37:49.000So Trump, of course, was very, very excited about this new revised package.
00:37:53.000There is only one giant problem, which is that it went down to flaming defeat in the House.
00:37:58.000And the reason it went down to flaming defeat in the House is because a lot of Republicans aren't actually all that fond of abolishing the debt ceiling.
00:38:04.000Because the debt ceiling has been a tool for ratcheting back government spending as long as I've been covering politics.
00:38:09.000I mean, going back decades at this point.
00:38:12.000Many Democrats, we're not going to give Trump a win on this anyway, so you're not going to get any Democratic votes on this.
00:38:16.000Among Republicans, there's a big problem.
00:38:19.000A lot of Republicans believe that raising the debt ceiling for like a full two-year period is basically carte blanche to spend and spend and spend and spend into oblivion.
00:38:28.000For example, Senator Rand Paul said there are proposals to raise it, there are proposals to eliminate it, I won't vote for that.
00:38:39.000Many Republicans were openly opposed to the idea.
00:38:41.000In fact, when this actual vote took place, 38 Republicans voted against it.
00:38:47.000Those 38 Republicans included many very strong Trump allies, including people like Representative Thomas Massey, including Representative Nancy Mace, including Representative Chip Roy.
00:38:59.000Now, Chip became the focus of the president's ire because Chip, who is a very staunch and very consistent conservative, Make no mistake, Chip Roy is not some sort of left-wing rhino-squish sellout.
00:39:18.000I am absolutely sickened by a party that campaigns on fiscal responsibility and has the temerity to go forward to the American people and say, you think this is fiscally responsible.
00:40:00.000We're there to do the right thing, and we can't agree with what Biden and the Democrats are demanding.
00:40:03.000Weak and ineffective people like Chip have to be dismissed as being utterly unknowledgeable as to the ways of politics and as to making America great again.
00:40:10.000Put America first and go for the victory, even if it means shutting down the government for a period of time.
00:40:14.000We had an overwhelming victory just four weeks ago, and we're not going to let Democrats forget it so quickly.
00:40:18.000Chip Roy is just another ambitious guy with no talent.
00:41:31.000Extreme MAGA Republicans are driving us to a government shutdown.
00:41:37.000Okay, and they're perfectly happy to have a government shutdown at this point because they believe that it will be blamed on President Trump.
00:41:42.000And listen, Trump believes it will be blamed on Biden.
00:41:47.000Trump is at the center of American politics.
00:41:49.000He is the black hole around which all gravity is now shaped.
00:41:53.000And so, of course, he's going to be the center of the story.
00:41:57.000He's always been the center of the story.
00:42:00.000This is the point that Wolf Blitzer on CNN was making to Republicans.
00:42:03.000How are you going to credibly blame this on Democrats?
00:42:05.000Again, this actually is Democrats' fault.
00:42:07.000Chuck Schumer prevented the normal appropriations process in the Senate from going forward.
00:42:10.000That's why you end up with these year-end Cromnibus packages.
00:42:14.000With that said, on just a PR level, when you have a deal that's been negotiated with presumably a level of approval from Trump and Vance, and then it gets undercut and then undersold and then destroyed, and then the replacement deal gets shut down by 38 Republicans, hard to say that that is about the Democrats rather than internal caucus warfare.
00:42:36.000Let me just point out, Congressman, as of right now, if you take a look at the roll call, 31 of your fellow Republicans in the House of Representatives are voting against this current bill right now.
00:42:47.000So how can you say this is the Democrats' fault when you're in the majority?
00:42:51.000I love you, Wolf, but you've got to stop just trying to defend the Democrats here.
00:42:56.000The fact is that we have a number of Republicans that have never voted for a continuing resolution, have never voted to lift the debt ceiling.
00:43:05.000This bill requires two-thirds of the House, not an absolute majority.
00:43:11.000So the fact that you have Democrats who normally would vote for this refusing to do so Not because they disagree with the CleanCR, not because they disagree with disaster relief, not because they disagree with aid to our farmers.
00:43:25.000No, they're doing so because they're upset that the debt ceiling increase is being taken off the table as leverage for them in future negotiations.
00:43:41.000Representative Lawler, he's not wrong here, but that's not the way they're going to play in the public view.
00:43:46.000Now, what actually happens if there's a government shutdown?
00:43:48.000As I say before, these tend to be very, very overblown.
00:43:51.000But according to Axios, for thousands of non-essential federal employees, a shutdown means they stop working.
00:43:55.000Now, the reality is they'll stop working for a short period of time, then the government shutdown will end, and they will go back to work.
00:44:00.000During the last government shutdown, from December 2018 to January 2019, about 420,000 federal employees were required to work without pay, while another 350,000 were furloughed from their jobs without pay.
00:44:11.000Accepted employees are those who keep working.
00:44:13.000Their responsibilities include services like emergency work involving the safety of human life or the protection of property.
00:44:18.000And then, of course, the federal employees are eligible for retroactive pay if they keep working while they're on the job.
00:44:38.000Pretty much national parks, Smithsonian Museum, all the things that the people in the media love to cover, but aren't sort of the day-to-day vital necessities of what people think of when they think of the government.
00:44:48.000So on a realistic level, is it a huge deal if the government shuts down?
00:44:52.000On a political level, is it good for President Trump to go into his administration with a government shutdown largely caused by a fractious Republican caucus?
00:45:00.000Republican Steve Womack of Arkansas, he points out that this is not going to redound to Republicans' benefit if there's a giant government shutdown right now.
00:45:08.000Here's the problem with shutting the government down is eventually it has to be reopened.
00:45:14.000And under what conditions would it be reopened?
00:45:17.000If you are able to extract concessions from the other side, then that's one thing.
00:45:22.000But if they're dug in and they're not going to give, Then, before long, you're going to see the real impact on everyday Americans that a government shutdown actually proposes.
00:45:34.000And the results of that, I think, would be disastrous to both the new majorities in the House and the Senate and the incoming president.
00:45:44.000So, where exactly do Republicans go from here?
00:45:47.000Well, over at Punchbowl News, there's a lot of speculation by Jake Sherman, who does a good job over there covering the news, as to what exactly happens next.
00:46:12.000They could also try a new negotiated settlement, theoretically, with Democrats.
00:46:16.000Or they could just pass the bill from yesterday without the debt ceiling increase.
00:46:21.000That includes the farm subsidies and includes the disaster relief and doesn't include some Democratic proposals and that doesn't have the debt ceiling increase.
00:46:28.000And see if they can get that by the Republicans.
00:46:30.000But the reality of politics is such, this is the thing that's important to remember going forward.
00:46:35.000President Trump needs to be on the same page with the Speaker of the House.
00:46:38.000Speaker of the House needs to be on the same page with President Trump, which I think has been happening.
00:46:41.000Elon Musk needs to be on the same page with both.
00:46:44.000Republicans need to be on the same page.
00:47:40.000Post-inauguration, you're still going to have an incredibly narrow House majority, an incredibly narrow Senate majority, and President Trump and Elon outside, who is calling balls and strikes as to the spending.
00:47:49.000Those incentive structures are not changing.
00:47:51.000So, if people are not on the same page, replacing one or other of the players is not going to change the actual outcome of the process.
00:48:22.000Presumably heard the voice of the people and reversed himself.
00:48:24.000This is not a blame game, and it shouldn't be a blame game, because theoretically, everyone should be on the same side.
00:48:29.000But in order for that to work, you have to have better coordination and a better understanding by everyone involved as to how the sausage actually gets made.
00:48:36.000Because the sort of pie in the sky, if I throw out a proposal, everyone will vote for it.
00:48:41.000By the way, it's much easier to nix a proposal than get people to pass one.
00:48:45.000Way easier to kill a bill than to get a bill actually passed.
00:48:51.000But the reality is that until you actually have the President of the United States working in tandem with a team that he likes to work with, them working in tandem with him, everybody understanding one another, you're going to get gridlocked.
00:49:05.000I'm all for the messy game of politics, ushering in a better policy.
00:49:09.000But when that mess becomes chaos, you don't even get the policy.
00:49:12.000This is presumably why Senator John Kennedy from Louisiana said, listen, I think the President Trump should just tell us what he wants and then we'll try to work on it.
00:49:21.000I think President Trump is going to have to consider coming to Washington.
00:49:26.000I mean, let's face it, he's the president now.
00:49:31.000President Trump needs to sit down with Mike Johnson and John Thune and come up with a new skinny CR. If the president wants to do something on the debt limit, we need to find out what it is and put it in the bill.
00:49:43.000And then the president's going to have to help Mike sell it in the House.
00:49:48.000Democrats in the House are not going to go along with it.
00:49:51.000Mike's problem, Speaker Johnson's problem, is that on the Republican side, he's got a bunch of free-range chickens.
00:49:58.000I'm not criticizing them, but they wander off, and Mike can't catch all of them by himself.
00:50:07.000The legislative process is a lot more complicated than putting out a statement on a social media platform by anyone.
00:50:14.000This is why I say, we all have different jobs.
00:50:16.000If you're a conservative, you have a different job, depending on what the job is.
00:50:20.000If you're a commentator, it's to call out when conservatism is not being pursued.
00:50:24.000And also to be honest about what is achievable.
00:50:25.000If you're a politician, your job is to get 70% of the loaf.
00:50:28.000All those interests are going to have to converge when Trump actually takes office.
00:50:31.000Again, I'm not super concerned about the CR. I'm not super concerned even about a short-term government shutdown.
00:50:36.000But Donald Trump has big, important priorities, and they need to get done.
00:50:40.000And the only way you get a big border bill is if the sausage gets made.
00:50:46.000The only way you're going to get tax cuts is if the sausage gets made.
00:50:49.000The only way you're going to get all of the priorities that President Trump campaigned on and deserves to have passed because the American people elected him.
00:50:55.000The only way that happens is if the process works.
00:50:58.000And so the process working is really, really important.
00:51:01.000Meanwhile, Democrats are reveling in the chaos in the Republican caucus.
00:51:05.000They're trying to force a wedge between Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
00:51:08.000What they're trying to do is suggest that Trump greenlit the bill, Elon Musk killed the bill, Trump followed Elon, therefore Elon is the real president.
00:51:14.000The reason they're doing this is not because they think that's true.
00:51:16.000Everyone knows Donald Trump is the actual president of the United States.
00:51:20.000The reason they're doing this is because they believe that if they keep saying that over and over, that Elon is the actual president running policy, then Trump will get frustrated with him and it'll create a personal gap between them.
00:51:30.000That is the actual strategy that is being applied here.
00:51:32.000That's why you see the cackling hyenas over at The View who are reveling in all of this.
00:51:38.000As D.C. barrels towards yet another government shutdown, a bipartisan bill to keep the lights on was scrapped.
00:51:47.000And it has a lot of folks asking, who is in charge?
00:51:53.000Because I've been saying it for a while.
00:52:25.000But again, the entire goal here is to create dissension in the ranks, which is why Republicans, why people who elected Trump should not engage in the internal firefight.
00:52:56.000They're going to try and play this up.
00:52:58.000It is really very clear to me that a non-elected billionaire, Elon Musk, has weighed in now and has put forth a message on Twitter from his phone that it's okay to shut has weighed in now and has put forth a message on Twitter from his phone that it's okay to The public is not going to tolerate that.
00:53:23.000The Republicans are now breaking the deal that was negotiated.
00:53:30.000Here we had a bipartisan agreement and to allow a billionaire whose wealth, quite frankly, I believe has doubled since the election to run our government really has grave consequences on the American people as it relates not only to the shutdown, but to the path forward in terms I believe has doubled since the election to run our government really . you Thank you.
00:53:53.000The goal of theirs is to split apart the massive coalition that President Trump has built, which is led by figures like Elon Musk, who, again, was not a Republican until the last five minutes or so.
00:54:03.000The Trump team has put out a statement about all of this.
00:54:06.000They said, quote, As soon as President Trump released his official stance on the CR, Republicans on Capitol Hill echoed his point of view.
00:54:13.000President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party, full stop.
00:54:19.000Better coordination, however, would definitely be helpful.
00:54:22.000The grind of the legislative process is going to have back and forth.
00:54:26.000I think it's very good that you have people like Elon and Vivek pointing out flaws in these bills.
00:54:31.000With that said, there are going to be tough choices made in politics, including by President Trump, to pass stuff that ain't 100% of what everybody would like.
00:54:43.000And because that is Donald Trump's job and Mike Johnson's job, and because that's not the same job as many of the purists, We should just recognize that reality going forward or it's going to be very tough to get things done in a second Trump term.
00:54:54.000When it comes to immigration, particularly, you need Mike Johnson.
00:54:57.000They're negotiating an immigration bill.